The Ski Journal • Volume 15, Issue 2 • POCKET TREASURES

The jacket smelled like a collision of mildew, stale sweat and spearmint gum. I thought I’d washed it—I’d definitely washed it (I think?)—but the overarching aroma had persevered. Sitting on the same hanger for 147 days will do that to a jacket, I suppose.

Despite my beer-and-pizza off-season training regimen, it still fit just fine. The dark green shell felt heavy though—like I’d put on a pair of middle school cargo pants laden with change. It kind of jingled like it too. Reaching into the pockets, I started digging out utter miscellany: a gas receipt from Butte, MT, a Japanese trail map, a Russian airline snack wrapper, way too many quarters, a moldy orange peel held together by a melted piece of the aforementioned spearmint gum—the kind of random crap you’d expect to find in a hoarder’s glove compartment. Yet when laid out on my kitchen table, the mess formed an unlikely narrative. A long road trip to Bridger Bowl. A bucket-list best-friend reunion in the Land of the Rising Sun. A last-second flight to Kyrgyzstan. A week snowbound in Haines, AK. A backcountry volcano mission in the Pacific Northwest. A winter on the road chasing what I figured was a 25-year-old’s ski dream.

But physical items weren’t the only things splayed out on the table. Excitement, anxiety, intense joy, immense loneliness, belly laughter, lower back pain, sheer exhaustion, in-the-moment contentment and a newfound appreciation for a world I’d never thought could be so big—they were all there too. Scared to say no to any opportunity as a young freelancer, I’d run myself around the globe, and, by the time I made it back to Seattle that spring, I was completely burnt out. I had put the jacket—and everything it held—into a closet and closed the door.

Only months later, while getting ready for winter’s next blast, could I appreciate that mess. The pocket treasures acted as my sensory time machine, a way to look back with some time-earned perspective. What a season. I smiled.

As a kid, I used to stash a dollar or two in my jacket at the end of every ski season. I knew future Kade would likely forget about it, but wouldn’t argue with a “free” hot chocolate when the lifts started up again. It was my first brush with the ski jacket time continuum, but far from my last.

In fact, the preseason pocket purge has become somewhat of a ritual. Money, trash, sticky, gooey things—they’re all part of acknowledging the year before while getting psyched for flakes to fly. OK, maybe not the lewd playing card I found in my season pass pocket a couple of years back, but most of them.

In a world obsessed with moving ahead, ski jacket pocket treasures are our tactile pause button, a way to appreciate what we’ve done, who we’ve done it with, and how lucky we are to have lived it all in the first place. Sure, in a perfect world, maybe we wouldn’t need a physical prompting to express gratitude. But the world is far from perfect, and a moldy orange peel can really do the trick.

The Ski Journal - Volume 15, Issue 2

POCKET TREASURES

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